Using Amiberry WHDBooter with RetroPie
Many of us already enjoy playing RetroGames via the Raspberry Pi, and this has led us to want to improve the experience.
Any shared game system like RetroPie needs that "one click to play" experience, that the Console generation crave, and this is an attempt to bring that to RetroPie .... We would like to remove the need to create game-specific/individual configs (.uae files) for every game, whilst the commonplace 'ADF' (Amiga Disk File) also results in original game bugs, diskswapping and limited improvement, where instead WHDLoad offers a better 'all in' experience.
Through clever use of a simple loader, internal Amiberry trickery and games in the WHDLoad installed format, we have put together a method for running WHDLoad installed amiga games directly from the RetroPie menu.
This guide is provided as a step-by-step guide to using the Amiberry WHDLoad Booter Solution with RetroPie in an attempt to achieve this.
How It Works:
- An installation of the latest version Amiberry to RetroPie
- Amiga Kickstart (BIOS) files
- Pre-installed WHDLoad games in the .lha format.
You will require RetroPie for this project. For alternative distributions, paths may differ.
Since you must use Amiberry for this project, you can do this simply from updating your RetroPie scripts and installing Amiberry as as additional package from source and set it as your default Amiga emulator, and you can then skip the rest of this step. This is shown in the pictures below.
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### Step 2: Install Kickstart Roms (aka Amiga BIOS files) files - these are essential
Firstly you must obtain and install a copy of the Amiga Kickstart Rom 3.1 (A1200 version) , which is the required amiga 'BIOS" (this is the more correct definition for 'rom' and should not be confused with game-data we will cover below.) This should be copied to:
/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/
You can use your usual method to transfer files for this, with the BIOS folder being available via FTP/SMB etc
Be sure to check the related areas of the Wiki for more information: Kickstart ROMs (BIOS) and the general WHDLoad Auto Booter page.
Example BIOS folder loaded with Kickstart ROMs, from OSX
Due to existing copyright on the Amiga Kickstart files we cannot provide a download link for this. However, Google is your friend. Please note that I have also been advised that the sold Amiga Forever kickstart files are encrypted and will not work with Amiberry unless the key file is also used.
Some games also require certain kickstart roms (Kickstart 1.3 and Kickstart 3.1 in particular) to be copied to the DEVS: section of the booting drive.
Amiberry will automatically create symlinks for these files from your BIOS folder if available so you do not need to do anything other than provide the files. It is therefore suggested you make as many kickstart files as possible available for use. Symlinks are created in the Amiberry WHDBoot configs section of RetroPie;
/opt/retropie/configs/amiga/amiberry/whdboot/save-data/Kickstarts/
The following links will be automatically created where possible. It is recommended you use this list as the 'base' requirement for Kickstart files.
For maximum compatibilty, the following files are searched for:
|
Symlink Name |
Common Name |
| kick33180.A500 | Kickstart v1.2 rev 33.180 (1986)(Commodore)(A500-A1000-A2000).rom |
| kick34005.A500 | Kickstart v1.3 rev 34.5 (1987)(Commodore)(A500-A1000-A2000-CDTV).rom |
| kick40068.A1200 | Kickstart v3.1 rev 40.68 (1993)(Commodore)(A1200).rom |
An example of successfully symlinked files, shown from command line.